Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) work on a pull-based model. The CDN advertises a Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) endpoint to the internet. Client requests are then routed to the closest (in internet terms) endpoint. If the target of the HTTP request is not in the cache of an endpoint, the CDN makes an origin (where the object is mastered) request, pulls the target of the HTTP request to the endpoint and caches the payload of the request. This adds additional latency. If the target of the HTTP request is in the cache, the request is served from the endpoint. These requests are served with lower latency because the object does not need to travel as far. Objects in the cache are evicted based on a predetermined model, such as a Least Recently Used model.
This approach is tailored for large objects that are read many times. This approach is not suitable for objects that are either read once or read very few times.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide improved techniques for distributing ephemeral objects in a content delivery network.